Madagascar: Never sing while you are eating

Like so many apparently innocuous acts, this is taboo on Madagascar, a beautiful island that defies explanation, says John Gimlette.

Soon after our arrival, we went to visit the King of Madagascar, even though he was dead. His home, more pavilion than palace, was out in the highlands.

Around the walls were his soldiers' tridents and a fancy mirror, given by Queen Victoria. There was a mysterious escape-hatch in the dining-room, and his ghost slept in a bed that had 10ft legs. Around it all was a rampart made of sand and the whites of 10 million eggs. No-one thought it odd to come and speak to the long-dead king.

"Our ancestors are everywhere," said our guide, "even in the trees."

Madagascar has always defied explanation. At its heart is Antananarivo, its strange capital. There I saw baguettes and rickshaws, cockfighting and car-races, the cobbled streets of provincial France, little English village churches, circumcision parties, poinsettias as big as a house, and strings of sausages round the block. My wife even spotted a travelling beautician with a bucket of make-up.

Odder still, this entire settlement was chiselled into the flanks of 12 sheer hills, nosing out of the rice. We were enchanted, as were the earliest visitors, in the 1630s. They thought Madagascar an earthly paradise, an arcadia, the Garden of God.

That's it, then: God's Garden. For who else would have thought to snip a piece off Africa and haul it almost 300 miles into the safety of the Indian Ocean? And safe it was. Things have survived here which have long been lost elsewhere - like 80 per cent of the island's flora, or 50 varieties of lemur. In the absence of pests such as lions and elephants, this menagerie has become conspicuously vain. We'd find chameleons adorned as if decorated by Fabergé, and sifakas in cream pyjamas and maroon velvet gloves.

Only a few hours from Antananarivo, the garden runs wild. I loved these journeys, through rice paddies, Tuscany, Borneo, the Middle Ages and Middle Earth. I gave up trying to understand it all, the Indonesian faces, the spears and the games of pétanque. We stayed at the Vakona Lodge, which was like a wigwam made out of bricks.

From the air, Madagascar was more implausible than ever, with its tiny round forts and swoops of turquoise and moon-rock. We paused momentarily at Diego Suarez, just as the Second World War had - the surf was still prickly with wrecks - and then headed into the hilly national park.

"The Montagne d'Ambre," announced Philippe, our guide. Philippe was part-tribal, part-French and at home in this forest. He knew every click and squeak, and every flash of feathers. There were 1,200 plant species here, he said. More than half were medicinal. Others were holy, protected by fady, or taboo. It was also fady to kill lemurs, sing while eating or hand someone an egg.

At the edge of this complex world was a delightful French manoir. Although the old Domaine de Fontenay had become a hotel, the place had barely changed. The giant tortoise in the stable-yard was now 150, and every night we bathed in a vast, marble sea-captain's tub. Then we were seated before one of Gustav Eiffel's fireplaces, and plumped up on tropical treats; confit de canard, lobster and slices of ice-cold beef. The only other visitors to our eyrie were an acrobatic lemur (begging for lettuce) and the fishman.

Henceforth, afternoon tea became a feature of our remarkable adventures. We had tea and madelaines in forests and empty coves, on desert islands and in gardens-within-gardens. Sometimes we were alone and sometimes there was a wildlife display - humming-birds or lemurs cartwheeling round the cakes. We thought this ritual was doggedly French, but our hosts thought it amusingly English. Even when we camped one night in the forest, Philippe created a tablecloth from flour bags.

As we moved on, we knew we were nearing the coast by the bicycles covered in fish. We passed volcanic cones and savannahs before reaching a sea that was was the colour of a swimming pool and pebbled with islands; Nosy Be, Nosy Komba and the Mitsio archipelago. The celestial spice gardens perhaps? Or Zanzibar but with more space and light? I can hardly imagine more ornamental isles, with their tiny hills and streams, and clumps of cloves and vanilla. Small wonder that, in 1904, a passing Russian warship simply abandoned its war, and defected to paradise.

Speedboats and dolphins carried us from haven to haven. We had these places mostly to ourselves; just us, fish-eagles and the occasional turtle. The real action was usually out in the turquoise, a carnival of fish; angels, clowns and two-foot clams. We stayed first at a tropical idyll, La Pirogue, where the hotel's shower erupted from a carved crocodile. It was a similar story on Tsarabanjina, except that now we had a desert island all of our own. The sand was sifted between cool forest and molten-chocolate rocks, and masked boobies wandered in and out of the bar. It was all so improbably pure that, in 1994 (just pre-hotel), the BBC abandoned Joanna Lumley here, a story that became Girl Friday.

"Bien sûr, elle est revenue," said the barman, "Everyone comes back."

For our last stop, we boarded a tiny aeroplane laden with tomatoes and plumbing parts. It was like a flight to the end of the world, or perhaps the beginning. Below us, the west coast looked like earth in the moments before life; virgin islands, powder-white sand and the grand, untenanted bush. Then I spotted a pirogue and we swept down on Anjajavy. As resorts go, it was hardly obtrusive; much of it had been built from the forest, though finished with Parisian élan. We had our own exquisite decked house, with our own stretch of beach and our own troupe of lemurs. The maids tidied up so enthusiastically that we thought they'd packed all our things and sent them home.

By day, we chugged around the islets. Some had been whipped into wine-glass shapes by the sea, and others were safe-havens for the dead (it's fady for a pig to walk over one's tomb). We also found ourselves among baobabs, the trees of children's drawings. There were more species here than in Africa and Australia put together.

The days seemed all too short. At night we had dinner by the beach, crab bisque, perhaps, or carpaccio of wild boar. One evening, the pastry chefs put on a tribal dance, and Monsieur L'oeuf (Mr Egg) told local jokes. As with so much of Madagascar, I found myself curled up with pleasure - even though I had no idea what any of it meant.

Getting thereRainbow Tours (020 7226 1004; www.rainbowtours.co.uk) offers a 15-night northern Madagascar tour from £2,725 per person, assuming two sharing. This includes all flights, transfers, guides, transportation, park fees and accommodation either on a b&b basis or full board. Return flights from London to Antananarivo via Paris cost from £775 with Air Madagascar, (01293 596665).